January 4, 2012

Statistical Overview of 2011

Well, we’ve made to 2012, and one of the first things I do at the beginning of each new year (well, besides and sit around and complain about the fact that we don’t all have flying cars yet, I’m really starting to suspect that this whole Future thing is getting to be just a bit overrated) is to put together a brief summary of some of the Blog’s vital statistics. Mostly I just do this for future reference, but I figure there might be a few people out there who are interested in this as well, so I might as well make it public. The short version is that for the second year in a row, overall traffic was down, but over the past couple of months I’ve been seeing it recover a bit, mostly thanks to search engine traffic for a few particular posts. As has been the case for most previous years, the vast majority of the traffic comes from a few specific posts, and most of that traffic comes from search engines and a few particular links that seem to generate a fair bit of traffic on their own, mostly posts that cover subjects that aren’t covered particularly well elsewhere on the Internet. Interestingly, even though the Totem Lake Mall post I wrote back in 2007 continues to be by far the most popular overall post on this site, a different post (the Whitman’s Sampler post) was the most read post on this site in 2011, accounting for over 12% of the site’s traffic by itself.

Although I have long since cast off any notions of being able to make a living off my Blog (or even much money in the first place, for that matter,) I still think it will be an interesting challenge to try to reverse the decline in site traffic. I suppose I could do a lot of this by just posting more often (I’ve been trying to maintain the standard of at least one post per week and generally trying to keep that post in the 1,000 word range, although I think I’ve been getting a little bit lazy on that one lately,) but there’s also something to be said for writing more of the types of posts that generate a fair bit of search traffic.

Anyway, as usual, I would like to thank those of you who have been reading this Blog, and hope you’ll keep reading.